Science News

Brain imaging shows that premature babies process speech in similar ways to adults.

Several high-profile projects that aim to replicate the processes of the human brain have recently received enormous grants. Still, completing the projects is not the ultimate goal, say researchers.

A growing body of work shows that the brain has different systems and mechanisms to respond to certain kinds of threats and physiological changes in the body

Here we describe an open online resource, the Allen Human Brain Atlas, which puts comprehensive, standardized data from multiple entire human brains into the hands of the global research community, along with tools for mining and making sense of that data. This resource opens new avenues for advancing research programs across disciplines that share an interest in the human brain—from neuroscience research programs based on functional MRI (fMRI) or neuropharmacology, for example, to comparative evolutionary studies and human genetics. The Allen Human Brain Atlas is a multimodal atlas of gene expression and anatomy comprising a comprehensive “all genes, all structures” array-based dataset of gene expression and complementary in situ hybridization (ISH) studies targeting selected genes in specific brain regions. All data are publicly available online (www.brain-map.org) along with a suite of integrated data visualization and mining tools that enable scientists to uncover connections between structure, function, and the brain's underlying biochemistry.

See more on http://www.brain-map.org/

Engineers have improved on the original and groundbreaking brain-computer interface by creating a wireless device that has successfully been implanted into the brains of monkeys and pigs.

Can we use our brains to directly control machines -- without requiring a body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and maybe for all of us. (Filmed at TEDMED 2012.)

For years, Henry Markram has claimed that he can simulate the human brain in a computer within a decade. On 23 January 2013, the European Commission told him to prove it. His ambitious Human Brain Project (HBP) won one of two ceiling-shattering grants from the EC to the tune of a billion euros, ending a two-year contest against several other grandiose projects. Can he now deliver? Is it even possible to build a computer simulation of the most powerful computer in the world—the 1.4-kg cluster of 86 billion neurons that sits inside our skulls?

Allan Jones joined the Allen Institute in 2003 to help start up the organization as one of its first employees. Bringing extensive expertise in project leade...

An 81-year-old Englishman woke up after having suffered from a stroke speaking only Welsh.

Using Hollywood movie trailers, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people's dynamic visual experiences.

Alex Huth, first author of our new paper, talks about how visual information about thousands of objects and actions are represented across human visual cortex. For more information, please visit our web site (gallantlab.org) or get the paper: Huth, A.G., S. Nishimoto, A.T. Vu & J.L. Gallant (2012). A continuous semantic space describes representation of thousands of object and action categories across the human brain. Neuron, December 20 2012.